ELEONORA DTJSE.
FLEONORA DUSE has died in exile, far from her Italian home and friends. To the end, as Destiny willed it, she was the donna miriade, the wandering woman, whose picture is in D'Annunzio's II Fuoco.
Her life was mainly made up of these wanderings, from the early days when she was a hard-tasked member of one of those bands of players who lived upon the road in Italy. One hoped that her retirement, a year or two before the War, would bring her the rest she needed and deserved. But she lost money, or gave it away with uncalculating generosity, during" the tragic years. She was forced to return to the stage.
Her reappearance (after seventeen years) in London at the New Oxford Theatre, last summer, was a strange theatrical experience—for the older playgoers, who were afraid, because they remembered her ; for the younger generation, who were sceptical, because they had heard her praised. The middle-aged recognized a ghost of the woman they had known ; a beautiful ghost faintly reanimated as the play went on. The " flame of life " had gone, inevitably, from that wasted face. The fire had fallen into ashes. But I hope that the more sensitive amongst the younger critics could discern what beauty there was still—could divine what greater beauty • there once was—in this art, so free from emphasis, so subtle and so close to nature. This beauty of Duse's acting was (in Walter Pater's phrase) a beauty " wrought out from within upon the flesh." She seemed to be searching in her own experience for the clue, the motive, that was to dominate her whole interpretation. If, after that, she gave the impression that she was living rather than impersonating a part, it was because she instinctively excluded all the local or accidental decora- tion whereby expert. " character actors " seek to differentiate types, to reveal eccentricity and so to con- ceal themselves. To that extent, Duse's acting was an abstraction. It was intensely personal, and yet elemental. In realising one self, it reached the self underlying the common human sensations and emotions. This effect was reinforced by the staging of the mainly unimportant plays she chose as excuses for self-revela- tion. The local and temporal detail disappeared, for example, from her version of such faded dramas as La Dame aux Camaias. Scenes indicative of the original Louis Philippian atmosphere disappeared. In spite of an irritating stage-management, scattering the stage with lumps of furniture behind which the most reserved of artists could conceal herself, in spite of an often pretentious yet quite irrelevant scenery, Duse never attempted to be Norwegian with Ibsen, English with Pinero, German with Sudermann. To have played these plays, " dated " by the costume of their periods (as Sarah Bernhardt played La Dame aux Camaias in later years), would have been, for her, an anachronism. It is true that, when she came under the influence of D'Annunzio he tried to distort her art by giving it an elaborately archaeological setting, as in his Francesca da Rimini. To me, I confess, the result was failure. D'Annunzio's genius was too rhetorical—if you prefer it, too lyrical—to adapt itself to Duse's method. Her Francesca wandered through the play like a phantom.
Her Italian Cleopatra walked uneasily under an Egyptian crown. Romantic drama never showed her at her best. She was a realist whose perfect sincerity of feeling could turn reality into the " sublime," Exceptions were only apparent. If she was mag- nificent as the wicked Cesarine in Dumas' apocalyptic play, La Femme de Claude, it was only at the expense (as usual) of dislocating the plot ; for her Cesarine was no longer the spiteful femme damnee of the author, but a justly embittered being, misunderstood, struggling in despair to regain her virtuous husband's love—a lost soul stifled because the dupes and prigs about her would not understand her longing to be torn from her temptations. " I want to be free from self-reproach ! " was the significant cry here—di non aver niente pia da rimproverarmi ! I have never seen anything finer on the stage than her playing of the second act in this play.
Her Hedda Gabler, again, was no mean, vain egoist, but a mysterious, noble nature, moving amongst shadows. Her exquisite Mirandolina was no loud-tongued inn- keeper, but an image of Duse as she may have been, when Duse was happy, long ago. Her Santuzza in Cavalleria Rusticana had indeed something of the peasant. But had not Duse, too, lived almost as the burdened Italian peasants do, in that early vita nonacule on the roads ? Her Paula Tanqueray was not the e,attish " pretty lady " of St. James's, but a woman whose thwarted maternity was concentrated on a longing for the affection of the girl who despised her. Her Magda was no partially emancipated German provincial, with a nostaglia for the four very ill-papered walls of a jerry-built " Heimat." She was a great free spirit who swept the puppets of her former life aside, with scorn and anguish unspeakable, as they clustered about her, to reimprison her in their conventions.
Obviously an art so personal had limitations. Duse constantly ignored whole sides of the characters she attempted. And she was a very unequal actress, so that one needed to see her many times in order to be sure of seeing her at her best. I have known her listless, under-acting, deliberately despising the offered oppor- tunity. But at her best she seemed to recreate the whole art of acting by effects one had never believed possible on the stage.
Thus an idea, a thought, a hope would seem to be born in her and to flit—the word made flesh—across her face, and so to realize itself in her beautiful smile, which made, as it were, a dissonance with the melancholy of her eyes. One sees her again, in memory, when Marguerite Gautier first realizes that the vague young man of the play is not as other men to her ; one remembers the manner in which she was so suddenly surprised into acceptance of him ; one recalls the candid and loyal gesture—without sentimentality—with which she handed him a flower, and with it so much of herself ! Her reading of his cruel letter in the second act, her letting it fall in renunciation of the vain vision, her following him about the stage with protesting cries against his insults in the ball scene, her " delicate death " at the end—these things still linger in ever-diminishing numbers of middle-aged minds, to be lost soon, or to become legends, as is the way with stage ephememls. Never- theless one thinks of them once more, with gratitude, as one hears that Eleonora Duse is dead.
RICHARD JERNINGS.
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